Harpo Speaks! Read online

  Our feast for the holiday would be a stack of sandwiches, liver-paste and cheese on stiff pumpernickel bread. The cheese was green, and so hard it had to be spread with a paint scraper, but it was delectable.

  We would stretch the day to the last possible minute, running—along with the rest of the crowd—to catch the last boat home. By the time the warped old tub chugged back into the East River, all the passengers would be on one side, leaning wearily toward home, and the boat would list until you could reach your hand over the rail and skim the scum off the river. It was a miracle every time it made the dock and got itself hitched to the piles and pulled up level before capsizing.

  It was always a melancholy homecoming. For most of us on board, the one-day excursion was the only vacation we would have from a year of hard work and misery. The blind man who played the concertina knew there wasn’t another nickel or penny left for his tin cup amongst the whole crowd, but he played on, and sang homesick Italian ballads.

  In the boat’s saloon there was a piano, bolted with iron straps to the deck. Its keyboard was locked. The piano must have been left over from the boat’s palmier days, when the passengers wore white flannels and linens, and there was an orchestra for dancing. Nobody ever played the piano on our excursions, and that was the sad part of the holiday for me.

  There was one supreme holiday every two years, and there was nothing sad about it. This was not a family affair. It belonged to everybody. The poorest kid in town had as much a share in it as the mayor himself.

  This was Election Day.

  Months ahead, I started, like every other kid, collecting and stashing fuel for the election bonfire. Having quit school, I could put in a lot of extra hours at it. I had a homemade wagon, a real deluxe job. Most kids greased their axles with suet begged or pinched off a butcher shop, but I was fancier. I scraped genuine axle grease off the hubs of beer wagons, working the brewery circuit from Ehret’s to Ruppert’s to Ringling’s.

  I hauled staves, slats, laths, basket-lids, busted carriage spokes, any loose debris that would burn, and piled it all in a corner of our basement. This was one thing the janitor helped me with. The Election Day bonfire was a tradition nobody dared to break. If you were anti-bonfire you were anti-Tammany and life could become pretty grim without handouts from the Organization. Worse than that, the cops could invent all kinds of trouble to get you into. So around election time, there were no complaints up the dumbwaiter shaft about the leaks in our garbage cans.

  The great holiday lasted a full thirty hours. On election eve, the Tammany forces marched up and down the avenues by torchlight, with bugles blaring and drums booming. There was free beer for the men, and free firecrackers and punk for the kids, and nobody slept that night.

  When the Day itself dawned, the city closed up shop and had itself a big social time—visiting with itself, renewing old acquaintances, kicking up old arguments—and voted.

  About noon a hansom cab, courtesy of Tammany Hall, would pull up in front of our house. Frenchie and Grandpa, dressed in their best suits (which they otherwise wore only to weddings, bar mitzvahs or funerals), would get in the cab and go clip-clop, in tiptop style, off to the polls. When the carriage brought them back they sat in the hansom as long as they could without the driver getting sore, savoring every moment of their glory while they puffed on their free Tammany cigars.

  At last, reluctantly, they would descend to the curb, and Frenchie would make the grand gesture of handing the cabbie a tip. Kids watching in the streets and neighbors watching from upstairs windows were properly impressed.

  About a half-hour later, the hansom cab would reappear, and Frenchie and Grandpa would go off to vote again. If it was a tough year, with a Reform movement threatening the city, they’d be taken to vote a third time.

  Nobody was concerned over the fact that Grandpa happened not to be a United States citizen, or that he couldn’t read or write English. He knew which side of the ballot to put his “X” on. That was the important thing. Besides, Grandpa’s son-in-law’s cousin was Sam Marx, a Big Man in the Organization. Cousin Sam had a lot to say about whose name appeared under a black star on the ballot. And it was he who made sure the carriage was sent to 179 at voting time. A man of principle, which Grandpa was, had no choice but to return the courtesy by voting.

  Then came the Night. The streets were cleared of horses, buggies and wagons. All crosstown traffic stopped. At seven o’clock firecrackers began to go off, the signal that the polls were closed. Whooping and hollering, a whole generation of kids came tumbling down out of the tenements and got their bonfires going. By a quarter after seven, the East Side was ablaze.

  Whenever our 93rd Street fire showed signs of dying down, we’d throw on a fresh load of wood, out of another basement, and the flames would shoot up again. After my stash was piled on the blaze, I ran upstairs to watch from our front window with Grandpa.

  It was beautiful. Flames seemed to leap as high as the tenement roof. The row of brownstones across the street, reflecting the fire, was a shimmering red wall. The sky was a great red curtain. And from all over the city, we could hear the clanging of fire engines. Our bonfire never got out of hand but a lot of others did on election night.

  Grandpa enjoyed the sight as much as I did, and he was flattered when I left the rest of the boys to come up to share it with him. He pulled his chair closer to the window and lit the butt of his Tammany stogie. “Ah, we are lucky to be in America,” he said in German, taking a deep drag on the cigar he got for voting illegally and lifting his head to watch the shooting flames. “Ah, yes! This is true democracy.”

  I had no idea what Grandpa was talking about, but he was a man of great faith and whatever he said was the truth.

  One fine spring day, a revolution occurred in our lives. The Marxes bought a piano.

  I hopped with joy when the movers hoisted it up to our flat. It was only a hacked-up, secondhand upright. But to me it was a shining symbol of all the pleasures of the good life, the forbidden pleasures of the outside world.

  Very soon I found out that our piano was not intended for pleasure. Minnie had bought it (five dollars down and a dollar a week) strictly for business. It was part of her Master Plan. Uncle Al was now on his way to the top in vaudeville, and the time had come for Minnie to go to work on her own brood and start them on their way. Chico, being the oldest, came first.

  Chico would learn the piano. Then he could not only work as a single, but also accompany Groucho, who was developing into quite an accomplished boy soprano. The two nephews would then follow their famous uncle up the ladder of success, bing boom bang.

  As for me, I’m afraid I was an afterthought in the Master Plan. It went without saying that I was the untalented member of the family. But so I shouldn’t be a total loss, I would take secondhand music lessons. Chico would pass on to me everything he learned from the piano teacher.

  The teacher was a hefty Viennese lady with a mustache. She and Chico loathed each other, and Chico hated music, but Chico did his duty. He never missed a lesson and he practiced every day, even though the piano took eight hours a week out of his pool and pinochle time. He did not, however, take the extra time to pass his lessons on to me, as Minnie had planned. I was never allowed in the living room when the teacher was there, since my presence would have raised the weekly fee from two bits to four. So what piano I learned, I learned by myself.

  This, I later realized, was all the better, because Chico’s teacher had a certain limitation. She could teach only the right hand. When she played, she faked with the left. Chico kept asking, at first, what he should do with his left hand, and the teacher would say sharply, “Never mind—that hand’s where the music is”—accenting the statement with a whack of her ruler on her pupil’s right knuckles.

  So Chico Marx became, at the age of thirteen, the best one-hand piano player in New York City. Well, the best one-hand piano player east of Lexington Avenue and north of 59th Street.

  Being entirely self-taugh
t, I was still in the one-finger stage. But I worked over the keyboard like a fiend, driving Frenchie and Grandpa out of their minds, I’m sure. Then came the day I played the chorus of “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie,” one-finger version, straight through without a mistake. This was the first accomplishment of my life that I felt really proud of. Flush with triumph, I doubled my repertoire, pecking out “Love Me and the World Is Mine.”

  My career had begun. As soon as I worked up to using both hands on both songs, I was going to apply for the job of piano player on the North Beach excursion boat. But as it turned out, the next step in my career was something entirely different.

  Drifting through the streets, with my head full of beautiful one-finger piano music, I got caught where I never would have been caught in my right mind.

  By the cellar steps of Goodkind’s Bakery, on Third Avenue, was a big stack of stove wood, which the baker sold, three sticks for a nickel. One afternoon I was standing in front of the bakery like a stuffed idiot, and an Irish gang from 96th Street came around the corner and trapped me.

  The Irishers said, “Hey, Sheenie! Lookit behind ya!” I turned, without thinking, and they slammed me smack into the stack of wood. In an avalanche of lumber I tumbled into the bakery basement, where the ovens were.

  Mr. Goodkind exploded onto the scene in a cloud of flour and fury and hauled me out of the woodpile. He said it was a miracle that no damage had been done to his joint. He asked me if I had a job. I said I didn’t. He said I was lying. I did have a job. I was working for him. I was the new Wood Stacker and Pie Sorter for Goodkind’s Bakery.

  When I finished restacking the stove wood, I was instructed in the duties of Pie Sorter. Fresh-baked pies were slid out of the oven onto a long table, dozens at a time. The crusts were stenciled to indicate their flavor—“A” for Apple, “AP” for Apricot, “C” for Cherry, and so on. I had to sort the pies according to flavor and arrange them on the shelves upstairs.

  I went diligently to work, and warm, fragrant work it was. Having a job wasn’t so bad after all. For this I would get paid!

  My pay, at the end of the nine-hour working day, was one cruller.

  I told Mr. Goodkind I was quitting. I had to have a better-paying job than pie sorting. He asked me if I owned a wagon. I told him I certainly did, a wagon with genuine black axle grease. “All right, young man,” he said. “1 can get a better job for you. My friend Mr. Geiger needs a delivery boy for weekends.”

  On Saturday morning I reported with my wagon to Geiger’s Dairy & Dried Fruits. I was hired on the spot. My hours were all day Saturdays and Sundays until noon. My pay was one dried prune per hour, which was a hell of a raise from one cruller per day.

  So at the age of eleven I entered the egg delivery field, having moved up from the pie-sorting profession. My elementary education was over. I was a workingman.

  CHAPTER 4 Enter: A Character

  THE MAN WHO first inspired me to become an actor was a guy called Cookie. Cookie had nothing to do with the theatre. He rolled cigars in the window of a cigar store on Lexington Avenue.

  This was the store with card games and bookmaking in the back room, the nearest thing to a social club in our neighborhood. It was Frenchie’s home away from home and, along with the poolroom, Chico’s too. Since gambling was never the obsession with me that it was with Chico, I didn’t spend much time in the back room. Where I had the most fun was on the street, in front of the store.

  Cookie worked at a low table, facing the Avenue through the window. He was a lumpy little man with a complexion like the leaves he used for cigar wrappers, as if he’d turned that color from overexposure to tobacco. He always wore a dirty, striped shirt without a collar, and leather cuffs and elastic armbands. Whether he was at his table in the window or running errands for the cardplayers, Cookie was forever grunting and muttering to himself. He never smiled.

  Cookie was funny enough to look at when he wasn’t working, but when he got up to full speed rolling cigars he was something to see. It was a marvel how fast his stubby fingers could move. And when he got going good he was completely lost in his work, so absorbed that he had no idea what a comic face he was making. His tongue lolled out in a fat roll, his cheeks puffed out, and his eyes popped out and crossed themselves.

  I used to stand there and practice imitating Gookie’s look for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time, using the window glass as a mirror. He was too hypnotized by his own work to notice me. Then one day I decided I had him down perfect—tongue, cheeks, eyes, the whole bit.

  I rapped on the window. When he looked up I yelled, “Gookie! Gookie!” and made the face. It must have been pretty good because he got sore as hell and began shaking his fist and cursing at me. I threw him the face again. I stuck my thumbs in my ears and waggled my fingers, and this really got him. Gookie barreled out of the store and chased me down the Avenue. It wasn’t hard to outrun such a pudgy little guy. But I’ll give Cookie credit. He never gave up on trying to catch me whenever I did the face through the window.

  It got to be a regular show. Sometimes the guy behind the cigar-store counter would tip off the cardplayers that I was giving Gookie the works out front. When they watched the performance from the back-room door and he heard them laughing, Gookie would get madder than ever.

  For the first time, at the age of twelve, I had a reputation. Even Chico began to respect me. Chico liked to show me off when somebody new turned up in the poolroom. He would tell the stranger, “Shake hands with my brother here. He’s the smartest kid in the neighborhood.” When the guy put out his hand I’d throw him a Cookie. It always broke up the poolroom.

  I didn’t know it, but I was becoming an actor. A character was being born in front of the cigar-store window, the character who was eventually to take me a long ways from the streets of the East Side.

  Over the years, in every comedy act or movie I ever worked in, I’ve “thrown a Gookie” at least once. It wasn’t always planned, especially in our early vaudeville days. If we felt the audience slipping away, fidgeting and scraping their feet through our jokes, Groucho or Chico would whisper in panic, “Ssssssssssst! Throw me a Gookie!” The fact that it seldom failed to get a laugh is quite a tribute to the original possessor of the face.

  The little cigar roller was possibly the best straight man I ever had. He was certainly the straightest straight man. If Cookie had broken up or even smiled just once, my first act would have been a flop and the rest of my life might not have been much to write a book about.

  Cookie-baiting was one of the few free pleasures I had left. As I got older, I acquired more expensive tastes.

  I spent more time in the poolroom, and the price of pocket billiards had risen from a penny a cue to two for a nickel. That was big money. An evening’s pool cost more than I usually managed to bring home from a day’s hustling, doing odd jobs and hocking whatever loose merchandise I might chance to find lying around.

  What took really big money was the Special Dinner at Fieste’s Oyster House. Dining at Fieste’s was the supreme luxury of my young life. Not that the food there was any better cooked than the food we had at home—when we had food. No common commercial chef could ever compete with Frenchie. But Fieste’s Special included things that Frenchie could only dream of putting on our table: Greenpoint oysters and cherrystone clams on the half shell, deviled crab, grilled smelts, French fried potatoes and onions, a juicy T-bone steak, hot rolls soaked with butter, apple pie with a slab of sharp cheese, and coffee rich with thick, sweet cream.

  As I said, a meal like this took really big money. It cost thirty-five cents.

  I soon learned what the main pitfall was in saving money. It wasn’t temptation, or the lack of will power. It was Chico Marx. Chico could smell money. Hiding my savings at home, anywhere in the flat, was useless. Chico always found it sooner or later.

  Once I thought I had him outsmarted. I sold a wagonload of junk over on the West Side, items I had selected off a moving van hitched in front of a house on
90th Street. The junk dealer gave me ten cents cash, the most I ever made on a single wagonload.

  I swore that this dime would not wind up in Chico’s pocket. For once I was sure it wouldn’t, because I had finally found the perfect hiding place. In our bedroom there was a small tear in the wallpaper, near the ceiling. Before Chico came home that night I stood on the dresser and pasted my dime to the wall under the flap of the torn paper. It was a slick job. I went to bed with a feeling of security.

  Next morning when I got up there was a bigger rip in the paper than before. My dime was gone and so was Chico. Chico was the only person I ever knew who could smell money through wallpaper. Maybe he didn’t have much of an ear for music, but he had a hell of a nose for currency.

  So I learned that the only way to protect my money was to spend it as fast as I earned it. I also learned to spend it on something I could eat, or use up, like dinner at Fieste’s or a game of pool. My possessions were no safer from Chico’s clutches than my money. Chico was a devout believer in the maxim “Share and share alike.”

  The way he shared my possessions was to hock them as fast as he got his hands on them, and then give the pawn tickets to me as my share.

  I was growing up. I wasn’t getting much bigger, but I was a lot cockier and wiser. I won my first fight. I beat the hell out of a kid from next door, a detective’s son, who was two years older and fifteen pounds heavier than me. Nobody was more surprised than he was—except me. I had never been known as much of a scrapper. I was better known for ducking and running. But now I was a fighting man.